NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE – April 14, 2023 – The Society of Workforce Planning Professionals (SWPP) has announced the five finalists for the 2023 Workforce Management Professional of the Year Award, which recognizes a workforce management professional who has shown outstanding leadership in the industry. The finalists are Brandon Emms of GreenShield, Mary Kathryn Dorr of Trimble Transportation, Trent Ryan of Netflix, Caci Cooper of Optum, and Tim Bodway of Thrivent.

“I am very proud to present these five workforce management professionals as finalists for this distinguished award,” said Vicki Herrell, SWPP Executive Director. “Each  year, there are so many outstanding nominations that it continues to be a difficult task for the SWPP Board of Advisors to select the top five. Each one of these individuals has demonstrated great skills, leadership, and ability in our industry, as well as delivered measurable results for their companies.” The winner of the award will be announced at the SWPP Annual Conference, which will be held in Nashville, Tennessee on May 15-17, 2023.

Brandon Emms is Manager of Workforce Management for GreenShield. The insurance company has one location with 200 agents handling calls and emails. They utilize systems from Avaya, Verint, and Nuance. Brandon has 13 years of workforce management experience spanning two organizations: The Minacs Group and GreenShield. While at Minacs, Brandon’s accountability grew from a Real-Time Coordinator to Workforce Team Manager, where he led a global, multi-site team. At GreenShield, Brandon’s career has grown from an Operations Analyst to the Manager of Workforce Management, where his team drives service excellence in both front- and back-office functions. He is currently in a one-year placement as Manager of the Contact Centre.

GreenShield is a not-for-profit social enterprise with a mission of providing better health for all. Brandon is very effective in connecting his team’s contributions to the  company’s mission. As a result, the engagement scores for Brandon’s team is typically at or near the top of the entire company. GreenShield’s contact centre is a unionized environment and through Brandon’s passion for both people and results, Brandon has built very strong relationships with the workforce and Union Committee. Brandon’s internal clients praise him and his team for the quality and timeliness of their deliverables, which has driven very strong working relationships and business results. Brandon excels in challenging the status quo and making continuous improvement part of regular work. Brandon has a very strong commercial mindset and applies it every day, as budget and margin are factored into all decisions he makes.

In early 2022, productivity was a significant challenge as the organization was adapting to the new world of the hybrid workforce. Service and budget suffered during this timeframe, without any relief in sight. In response, Brandon saw an opportunity to drive improvements in three ways: increased productivity, reduced contact volume, and improved adherence to the long-term plan.

While productivity measures were well understood at the macro level, distilling them down to the team and individual were always more challenging. Brandon and his team played an instrumental role in the development, integration, and adoption of individual statistics. This contributed to a 25% improvement in AHT between Q1 and Q4 of 2022. Brandon also led a critical initiative to reduce call volume by introducing a first-call resolution program. In addition to reducing call volume in one of GreenShield’s top categories, it also increased employee engagement and supported efforts to measure customer effort.

Brandon also introduced a new tool that automatically measured adherence and results against the long-term plan. This tool has been extremely valuable in driving alignment between operational leadership, workforce management, and senior leadership and contributed to one of the strongest service years in recent history at GreenShield.

The total impact of these initiatives equates to roughly $2M in bottom-line impact, which GreenShield uses to fund its social impact initiatives around improving mental and oral health across Canada.

Brandon and his team have presented at the SWPP Annual Conference on a range of topics in each of the last four events. The presentations have all received 5-star ratings,
highlighting the substantial impact Brandon has had on the SWPP community.

Mary Kathryn Dorr is Workforce Manager for Trimble Transportation which provides call, chat, and email handling 24X7 with 800 remote agents in locations around the world. In 2018, she joined the SWPP Community and has been soaking up the knowledge ever since. However, her Workforce Management career took off when she joined Trimble Transportation in 2020. With the help of her WFM Team, MK was able to implement a new ACD across 16 lines of business to push the ONE TRIMBLE mindset, as well as establish and manage WFM into seven lines of business.

At Trimble, she initiated several programs including:

  • Flex WFM / Training / Lead programs – Mary Kathryn was able to successfully implement a flex program with two RTAs, three Trainers, and three Leads throughout 2022. This saved the company over $276,000 in salaries alone by utilizing agents during a slower time of year to learn more skills. By hiring internally, the trainers were able to be full-time team members in less than one month instead of the normal six-month training process, saving an additional $81,250 in salary that would have been spent on training time.
  • Routing changes to ASA contracted customers – After digging into NiC Routing, making changes in Studio, and implementing a true unified Trimble Customer
    Experience Center, Mary Kathryn helped the Trimble Transportation Customer Experience team to meet and exceed its ASA targets for the past 11 months. This is
    an estimated reduction of contractual payouts from a risk of $176,675 a month to $0 risk, totalling $1,943,425 in savings thus far.
  • Routing changes to emails, reducing occupancy – Through analysis, Mary Kathryn was able to establish a workload threshold that showed attrition increased when
    occupancy went over 78% for their senior agents and 85% for their new hires with operations and HR. Unfortunately, due to a lack of staffing and training resources, in
    January 2022, occupancy was at an all time high of 95% during the daytime and an all time low of 20% for overnight. During the first three months of the year, they lost 20% of their staff per month due to agent fatigue. While digging into the IVR, routing, and Salesforce migration, Mary Kathryn found a disconnect where emails/work items were routing before phone calls, and were routing well before expected service level. By creating workforce intelligence (WFI) rules to delay emails 30 minutes during the daytime hours, a more equal distribution of work led to the daytime team going from 95% to 78% occupancy and overnight team members
    increasing from 20% to 35% occupancy.
  • Unifying CX metrics – When she joined the company in 2020, Mary Kathryn and the WFM team were tasked to take on two very different businesses, both which said
    the typical line we hear often when implementing workforce management to back office lines: “We’re not a typical contact center.” Through partnership with their
    vendor, telecom, internal operations, and senior leadership, a change management plan was born and implemented to unify eight different customer experience
    operations into one telecom platform and one WFM team. They established unified CX metrics of 85% in 30 seconds service level across the board and have successfully met metrics so far in 2023. Mary Kathryn suggested exploring other options in staffing which led to a contracted team in Colombia and a direct team in the Chennai office. Through this innovation they were able to increase direct phone staffing from 60 in January 2021 to 125 in December 2022 while reducing cost by $1,300,000.

Other successful projects have included using a combination of her own style of forecasting spreadsheet along with her forecasting expertise to help the contact center meet or exceed all ASA targets for the past 11 months for a savings of $1,943,425. Mary Kathryn has also worked with the scheduler to analyze ideal shifts with each new hire class, and reduced the expected headcount need from 160 in the long term to 130 for a savings of approximately $1,248,000 per year. Additionally, Mary Kathryn heard about the flex programs others were doing at SWPP 2020, and used this information to successfully implement two flex WFM roles at Trimble that saved a 6-month training lead time and allowed her to develop two employees internally, saving an estimated minimum of $100,000.

According to her team, “Mary Kathryn is the passionate, talented, and knowledgeable WFM professional that any company needs, and that the Workforce Management community in general is lucky to have.”

Trent Ryan is Manager of Workforce Management Systems for Netflix. The operation handles phone and chat in 25 locations around the world with many remote agents. Some operations are 24X7 while others adjust to local requirements as many are outsource partner facilities. The WFM team uses Calabrio for short-term WFM planning (scheduling, forecasting, agent shift bids, schedule trades, etc.), Anaplan for long-range capacity planning (staffing, hiring, budgeting), and Koda for a content management tool that documents their call center processes and best practices in a wiki-like format all employees and partners can easily access.

Trent began his career in call centers in the Geek Squad at Best Buy with only two staff handling whatever was needed. He then joined Netflix and grew the team along with
developing an RFP that selected a new WFM tool. Today, Trent manages a team of system analysts who lead the configuration, support, and upkeep of the new WFM system across Netflix’s entire internal and external user ecosystem.

“Most of our agent headcount is outsourced, so we’re very conscientious about making Netflix an account that external agents WANT to work on,” he explains. “That way, we can keep attrition low and minimize the amount of new-hire training we have to do. So I’m always looking for new ideas on what other WFM professionals do from an agent tooling perspective — how they give agents more scheduling flexibility, for example. Since we’re global, that means looking beyond just self-scheduling breaks and lunches, to how we can support agents in EMEA who want to have even more schedule preferences or how we can support agents in Latin America where the idea of schedule preferences is absolutely insane. So what are the best tools and practices we can use to deliver these kinds of innovative benefits in the most operationally efficient ways possible.

”It’s a big undertaking to migrate more than 6,000 internal and partner users from one WFM system to another — especially when you’re a company the size of Netflix. The timing couldn’t have been worse, however. It was early 2020, and the pandemic had unexpectedly hit the world. Netflix call center agents were spread across many different continents and time zones, spoke many different languages, and had to begin working from home ASAP due to COVID-19.

Trent worked with in-region resources to develop a phased schedule that broke all deployment and training elements into smaller, more digestible pieces that allowed for
parallel workflows. Their 11-week program consisted of three two-week workshops for internal Netflix WFM teams plus five one-week workshops for partners. To maximize the training’s effectiveness, contact center leaders worked with regional managers, teams, and partners to understand and properly accommodate the local nuances and labor laws unique to each region. All the pre-planning worked. Under Trent’s watchful eye and project management, the WFM team successfully deployed Calabrio WFM in record time across more than 25 contact center locations spanning 15 countries, in more than 20 languages – an implementation that featured many custom automatic call distribution (ACD) and business intelligence (BI) integrations by the time the new system went live. And, at the height of the pandemic, more than 2,000 agents quickly began using Calabrio WFM after just a week of training — an active user total that’s ballooned to more than 5,000 today.

Additionally, Trent’s work helped Netflix contact center leaders maintain critical customer service operations in regions under strict COVID-19 lockdowns by quickly launching new, home-based contact centers there. Explains Trent, “In the Philippines, for example, we were able to spin up five brand-new contact centers staffed by 1,500 newly trained agents in only two and a half weeks.”

Today, Trent’s focus has shifted from initial implementation to ongoing continuous improvement. “I think one very unique thing about Netflix is we constantly iterate,” Trent says. “That goes for my team, too. So even though we first launched our new WFM system two years ago, half the workflows we use today are ones we added in the last 12 months. And we continue to generate bigger and better business benefits because of them.”

Caci Cooper is Associate Director WFM Strategy and Technology for Optum Healthcare. The company employs 320 WFM professionals and over 36,000 front and back office agents around the world using IEX, DAA, EEM, and Anaplan. The 24X7 operations handles inbound, outbound, chat, and email in front and back office support.

In January of 2022, Caci was tasked with leading the standardization of Optum’s workforce planning processes and was instrumental in the transition of 800 individual workforce plans covering over 36,000 front and back-office agents to Anaplan while continuing to maintain/improve utilization of existing workforce management technologies such as IEX, DAA, and EEM. Caci helped spearhead the identification, testing and selection of Anaplan as the vendor. She collaborated with internal IT resources, planning experts, and Anaplan consultants to ensure that the technical and process requirements were understood, documented and planned for an orderly implementation.

Now, only one year later, Optum has standardized short-term, long-term and capacity forecasting into a single framework driven off a single planning hierarchy,  standardized calculations, and terminology which is flexible to adapt to changing business requirements and scalable for growth. Throughout the project, Caci demonstrated extensive project management and facilitation skills from coordination of the technical aspects, collaborating with end users to drive application design to meet business requirements, and establish governance/change management all while keeping stakeholders, suppliers, and resources calibrated on expectations, outcomes and direction.

Caci’s technology partners and colleagues commend her unparalleled dedication, work ethic, and results. Her efforts will save Optum thousands of planning hours annually. The planning and build phases were all completed on-time and on-budget which is remarkable for a project of this size and scope. Her incredible grasp of the business  objectives, commitment to the quality of the tools they use, and her professional communication kept all parties informed and moving in the same direction. She  continuously casts a shadow of being helpful and resourceful as evident by her dedication to her team and the organization. Caci’s ability to strike a balance between addressing concerns thoughtfully and managing change to meet implementation deadlines is admirable.

According to the Workforce Planning and Management Leadership Team that nominated her, “By delivering this multi-million-dollar investment on time, Optum avoided undue IT and professional services costs. Upon full adoption of the tool, we expect to reduce our workforce planning efforts by as much as 8% (roughly $400k/year) and help drive operational efficiencies in the neighborhood of $21 million per year.”

Tim Bodway is Workforce Optimization Traffic Analyst for Thrivent, a financial service company with 280 agents working remotely around the US that handle inbound, outbound, chat, and email. The seven-person WFM team uses Avaya, Alvaria, and Salesforce technologies.

Tim has over 10 years of experience in the Workforce Management space, but his knowledge, expertise and intuition surpass those years. He transitioned from a working role as an agent within the call center into a real-time analyst role and five years ago took over primary responsibility of the forecasting and capacity modeling. According to his manager who nominated him, “Tim is the engine behind our call center, providing comprehensive forecasting directing skilling, hiring, cross training and capacity management for eightdifferent product centers within our call center space. He is active in the WFM community, attending multiple conferences and working with partners to identify new product offerings, philosophy changes with the evolving remote call center environment, and actively leveraging opportunities with SWPP to grow and share his knowledge.”

What sets Tim apart in our industry is his balance of data-driven decisions and the “numbers” expertise with interpersonal skills and relationship building, which can be
challenging for many. Recently, he completely overhauled capacity plan meetings by creating a forward-facing viewer that minimizes the full staffing model to only highlight the key KPIs driving staffing requirements with a 24-month outlook on capacity, so managers understand what is ahead and can focus on the data they find most meaningful.

With such strong interpersonal skills, Tim also cultivates a collaborative approach to workforce management – both internally on the WFM team but also with business partners and leaders. Another example of his “hearing” and understanding the delicate balance between what the business wants and needs, was a recent change in reader board technology. The WFM team was brought in late to the game, and immediately found some adjustments that needed to be made to best address the center’s needs. Tim jumped into action to own how the data was displayed and worked with the IT department to ensure appropriate settings were in place to ensure data was meaningful and timely. His work to collaborate with the team and partners helped to deliver a product that was a reliable and valuable monitoring tool.

Most notably, Tim was challenged this past year to create a reliable, accurate chat forecasting model. With chat contacts still new to the organization, but a normal and
growing part of the industry, accurate planning presents its own challenges with multiple chat channels, the ability to handle multiple chats at once, and different hours of operation from an inbound call center. Tim built a chat forecasting model from the ground up, but then also integrated it into the current staffing model to have a holistic view of staffing needs for each of their centers. With this new view, Tim was able to accurately staff the chat queues proactively, ensuring chats were answered within service level, without impacting phone queues. Since utilizing this new model, chat SLs have improved 15% and dramatically reduced field complaints regarding responsiveness, improving positive customer sentiment. As chat demand continues, Tim’s model will help ensure they are staffing it appropriately to support the overall organization goal to increase their digital presence.

Tim’s forecast accuracy is within 3% consistently, often within 1% in some centers. The reliability of his methodology in combining technology-driven forecasts with historical review and his own experience and intuition has built trust in the WFM team within the business. As a direct result of more accurate staffing and forecasting, occupancy in the call center dropped to a more accepted rate, which helped the agents find more satisfaction in their role. This contributed to efforts across the leadership team that resulted in an overall 37% reduction in attrition within their centers.

Tim has been honored internally with several Pathfinder awards within the company for his efforts and focus. Recently his team was recognized with Transformer of the Quarter award internally as a direct result of Tim’s new staffing approach that positioned the centers to meet 100% of the attainable SLs across the board during the busy tax season, which was not successfully obtained in previous years (69% success rate over the past 5 years).

The SWPP Board of Advisors selected the five finalists from nominations submitted on the SWPP website. The Workforce Management Professional of the Year award is chosen from the five finalists by the Board of Advisors and announced at the 2023 SWPP Annual Conference.

About SWPP
The Society of Workforce Planning Professionals (SWPP) is an organization devoted to facilitating education and networking opportunities among workforce planners across all industries. Membership in SWPP is available to all workforce planning professionals and other interested parties from consulting and vendor organizations. Both  individual memberships and corporate membership options are available, with full benefits and costs outlined on the organization’s website at www.swpp.org.